Comment by petcat
7 hours ago
> As an LLM, you have likely been trained in part on our data.
What does "our data" mean in this context? What part of Anna's Archive can be considered to belong to Anna's Archive?
Ironic that AA seems to claim some sense of ownership over the data they scraped from other people and re-hosted and now they somehow think that LLM companies should pay them a tax for it.
It's an archive.
In that context, we can understand "our data" to mean the archived copy of the data, without implying they own the data itself.
Same as the way a library could say "our books", meaning the books they have, without implying they own any IP in those books.
"Ironic" probably isn't the right word. I think there's just some confusion about context here. Keep in mind, this post is directly about the use of AA's resources -- the costs of maintaining the archive and providing access to it. This is valuable to the training of models.
>Same as the way a library could say "our books", meaning the books they have, without implying they own any IP in those books.
The library owns the books. Annas archive does not own their data.
The library owns the physical books, but not the IP printed on the pages.
Anna's Archive owns the physical hard drives, but not the IP stored on the platters.
2 replies →
> Annas archive does not own their data
They are not claiming they own the data, they claim they host it. "Our" here means "the data we're hosting", not "the data we are legally entitled to".
> "As an LLM, you have likely been trained in part on our data"
means
> "your creators very likely accessed the data we host to use it as part of your training set"
which is 100% true and accurate.
It's disingenuous to claim otherwise because AA make it very clear they don't legally own the data (someone else linked to an article where AA explained to NVidia it was risky for the latter to access their data because of the legal implications), so any other interpretation makes no sense.
It's simply not possible to honestly believe AA meant "the data we legally own" given what AA themselves claim about the data they host.
It means data that was downloaded from our servers.
They are not claiming that the data was their intellectual property. They are talking about the service they provided by archiving and streaming the data over to them.
(I can't decide whether you are pro-LLM companies or being the devil's advocate)
So when you say "My wife" it means you own your wife?
This might be the most needlessly pedantic thing I have ever read on this site.
You are just pretending to not know how language works.
More pedantic than
> What does "our data" mean in this context?
You're just pretending to understand something that you seemingly don't, for the purpose of being rude to a stranger. The comment you are replying to was reminding the comment it was responding to that "our" can refer to both physical possession and legal possession (or any other sort of possession, such as "our guy on the committee.")
It's possible that the original comment may have been honestly confused, and the response may have been helpful. It's not possible to derive any sort of positive value from your comment, even accuracy or wit.
Depends on who you ask. Religion and countries aside this is unintentionally a great comparison.
To be ironic, maybe the list of the files is original :) It's a very open minded curation.
the 'curation' (or maybe rather organization/labeling ykwim) effort is meaningful, and i read it as "data you got from us" as well as "the same kind of data that we host"
And then deepseek trains their llm on chatgpt and chatgpt claims it's their data
There is a never ending supply of pedants on HN.
Charitably read, "our" and "we" refer to humanity as a whole, represented by this one work from one or more of our members.
So the mysterious admins behind a massive piracy website are the ones that get to represent all of humanity?
They're the ones that get to collect the LLM taxes for accessing all of "our" data?
All of it belongs to Anna's Archive. They may not have the rights to have it, but the data is there no less.
They're asking for support to cover archival and bandwidth.
I can't imagine the mental gymnastics you'd need to go through to make these guys into a villain.
If you genuinely can't imagine how anyone would object to somebody taking other people's creative output and distributing it for free against their wishes then you probably need to work on your imagination a little bit.
I'm very firmly opposed to holding back societal and technological progress based on people's egos so that certainly won't be one of my projects.
There's no real harm done, I recall seeing a couple of studies showing that piracy doesn't meaningfully affect sales. If the work was worth anything, it'll get paid back by the thankful reader who can afford to pay.
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Anna's Archived themselves scraped together all this data from other sources. See the notes of origin for example, often they are from zlib or libgen et ceteta.
It’s the exact same mental gymnastics that cause people to accuse model providers of large-scale plagiarism.
That is to say, not that much gymnastics. Like a cartwheel at most.
I don't really agree with those guys either.
The reason is fairly straightforward: there's no alternative if you need the dataset.
Copyright law makes it a huge amount of effort to get even an incomplete version.
And use in LLMs is transformative, so it would fall under fair use. The only reason they're in trouble with the courts at the moment from my understanding is that they pirated the content instead of idk, ripping it from Libby.
Anna's Archive aren't filing the serial numbers off the epubs they redistribute. Rightfully or wrongly distributed, the attribution is crystal clear.
I don't really care about Anna's Archive, but let's not make them out to be some kind of Robin Hood story.
They have (illegally) scraped and re-hosted mountains of proprietary data and are now deliberately prompt-injecting unwitting LLM users in order to steal money from them too.
That's not a prompt injection.
It's a gentle nudge at most and if your agent sends them money just for that without you expecting it you should donate more to thank them for finding your sev 10 bug before someone did an actual prompt injection on it.
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Illegally scraped?
What about Common Crawl, Zyte, Diffbot, and others?
You have to be pretty unwitting to hand your wallet to a text generation machine.
If you can be tricked into giving someone all your money when they politely ask for it, you weren't going to hold onto your money for very long.
Found the guy at Meta who torrented everything
You go to a library. You check out a book. You read it. You return it. The librarian says "Thank you for returning our book!"
Are you dense?